Technical Field
The inventions relate to multimode optical fibers, devices useable with or including multimode optical fibers, and methods to use such fibers and devices.
Discussion of the Related Art
This section introduces aspects that may be helpful to facilitating a better understanding of the inventions. Accordingly, the statements of this section are to be read in this light and are not to be understood as admissions about what is prior art or what is not prior art.
Multimode optical fibers have been known for a long time. Herein, a multimode optical fiber is an optical fiber that has two or more optical propagating modes at a single wavelength where two of the optical propagating modes have different group velocities. In a radially symmetric multimode optical fiber, optical propagating modes with different radial, light-intensity profiles typically have different group velocities. But, some values of the group velocity may be associated with multiple optical propagating modes in such a multimode optical fiber. For example, an axially symmetric multimode optical fiber may have a set of optical propagating modes with the same radial light intensity profile and orthogonal polarization distributions and/or angular momenta of opposite sign. The different modes of such a set may have the same group velocity in the axially symmetric multimode optical fiber.
In recent years, some research has targeted the use of multimode optical fiber to optically transmit a higher data rate than a single mode optical fiber. In particular, in a multimode optical fiber, different optical propagating modes may carry different data streams. For example, the use of different optical propagating modes to carry different data streams may enable an increase of the data rate per wavelength channel over the data rate in many single mode optical fibers.